1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for automatically binding elongate products such as slide fasteners into bundles.
2. Prior Art
Generally, finished slide fasteners are successively received and stored in trays, then manually bundled up with binding strips and finally packaged for delivery. To this end, considerable manpower and skill have been required particularly for tying individual fasteners together into uniform and firm bundles as desired. Therefore, such manual operation is literally laborious and time-consuming.
The binding strips for slide fasteners have various reference characters or symbols printed thereon to indicate the type, size, color, quantity and other designations for each different group of the slide fasteners. Therefore, the binding strips must be sorted out and allocated for particular fastener groups, for which purpose there are required as many different binding strips as there are specifications for individual slide fastener products. This presents storage problems and invites human error in handling such versatile binding strips.